Nature Newsreports on a study that found a correlation between certain brain wave measurements and pain intensity. The not-yet-published study will add to a growing body of neuroscience research that correlates the experience of physical pain with objective findings in brain images and other diagnostic media. This particular study was highly invasive, but a great deal of research involves non-invasive brain imaging. For example, a group of German researchers have reported finding microstructural changes in the brain associated with chronic back pain using a technology called diffusion tensor imaging.

New pain assessment tools have tremendous potential to improve court and administrative proceedings that relate to personal injury and disability. Right now, juries are frequently called upon to assess damages for pain, even though many people exaggerate symptoms; some claims are entirely malingered. On the other hand, people can also have quite genuine claims for which they have little objective proof. And people with certain mental or motor difficulties may be incapable of telling us about the pain from which they nevertheless suffer. Juries and administrative law judges sometimes have little more to go on than hocus pocus. While we're a long way from having technologies ready for the courtroom, it's only a matter of time before courts are confronted with new neurotechnologies purporting to demonstrate the presence, absence, or intensity of pain symptoms.

Papers should be no more than 5,000 words, excluding notes and references, and should be prepared for blind review. Electronic submissions should be sent toWalter Sinnott-Armstrong by January 15, 2008. Approximately six papers will be selected from the submissions for presentation at the conference. A smaller subset of these papers will be published in an issue of EPISTEME, with Frederick Schauer and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong as Guest Editors. Conference organizers are: Frederick Schauer and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.

I have learned from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong about the following event, sure to interest many of our readers:

Symposium on Real-Time Consciousness, Volition and Action - A Tribute to Ben Libet

Sponsored by the Macarthur Law & Neuroscience Project, andThe University of Arizona Mind, Brain and Society Program.

This symposium consists of two 4 hour sessions to honor the work of Benjamin Libet and its implications for moral and legal responsibiity. Libet, who died in the summer of 2007, was well known for his ingenious experiments that seemed to show that conscious will occurs after readiness potentials in the brain. These striking results are often interpreted as showing that conscious will does not cause actions or that we do not have free will, but only free won't. We want to bring together some psychologists and philosophers who support this interpretation together with others who reject it, as well as scientists who are doing new work that builds on Libet's findings. We will also bring philosophers and lawyers to discuss the implications of Libet's work for freedom and responsibility.

The following message was sent to the Neuroethics & Law Blog by Daniel Goldberg:

The Eagleman Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine is pleased to announce the launch of the Initiative on Law, Brains & Behavior.This Initiative addresses how new discoveries in neuroscience affect the ways we make laws, punish criminals, and develop rehabilitation.The project brings together a unique collaboration of neurobiologists, legal scholars, ethicists, medical humanists, and policy makers, with the goal of building modern, evidence-based policy.

BCM, a top ten medical school, is particularly well-positioned to host such an Initiative, being home to a top-flight neuroscience department and one of the premier research neuroimaging facilities in the nation.At present, the ILBB currently teaches an interdisciplinary seminar on Law, Brains, and Behavior.Graduate students in neuroscience, law students, undergraduate students, mental health professionals, medical humanists, and health policy scholars are all participating in the seminar.The ILBB will also host a conference in the fall of 2008, bringing together stakeholders from a variety of disciplines to address the ethical, legal, and social implications of developments in neuroscience.

Discussion regarding other ILBB projects and areas of interest is ongoing.Further information is available on the ILBB website:

http://neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman/neurolaw.html

Those with questions regarding the ILBB are invited to contact the Director, David Eagleman, Ph.D. or the Research Professor, Daniel S. Goldberg, J.D., Ph.D Student.

Behavioral
Sciences and the Law announces a forthcoming special issue on the
neuroscience of decision making and the law, to be co-edited by Steven
K. Erickson, J.D., LL.M., Ph.D. and Alan R. Felthous, M.D. Manuscripts
that address the following issues are especially welcome: Neuroscience
and neuroimaging results of areas of moral judgment; the impact and
limitations of such finings on legally relevant behavior;
neuropsychiatric, neuropsychological and genetic disorders which
impinge on intent and responsibility. Original research reports and
forensically relevant literature reviews will be included.

In addition to clinically relevant manuscripts examining the above
issues, legal reviews and scholarly essays examining the interplay
between relevant scientific findings and historic or contemporary legal
norms are also sought. In particular, essays which explore the
development of concepts of intentionality and responsibility in light
of salient scientific findings are welcome. Such manuscripts should
incorporate recent findings from the neuroscience field.

Manuscripts could be 20 to 30 doubled-spaced typewritten pages and
should comply with the editorial and referencing style of the most
recent edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological
Association or the Harvard Law Review’s Association’s The Bluebook: A
Uniform System of Citation (but not both). Specific style requirements
can be found in a recent copy of the journal, or can be obtained via
direct communication with any of the journal’s editors.

To expedite processing, submit the manuscript electronically. Authors
should use e-mail attachments, with the manuscript readable in
Windows-based MS Word or Word Perfect formats. If using postal mail,
submit manuscript in triplicate with two copies prepared for blind
review, to either of the special issues editors, Steven K. Erickson,
J.D., LL.M., Ph.D. or Alan R. Felthous, M.D. who can be reached at:

Here's a NYT letter to the editor from a group of neuroscientists challenging Sunday's neuropolitics op-ed. While it's hard to disagree with the gist of the letter, one can pick on a few points where the letter writers could have made their claims more pointed and precise:

(1) The letter says that the op-ed "claimed that it is possible to directly read the minds of potential voters by looking at their brain activity while they viewed presidential candidates." This probably overstates the view of the op-ed authors. The op-ed purports to make inferences from brain activity; the op-ed authors might well deny that they are "directly read[ing] the minds" of swing voters.

(2) The letter also says "As cognitive neuroscientists who use the same brain imaging technology, we know that it is not possible to definitively determine whether a person is anxious or feeling connected simply by looking at activity in a particular brain region. This is so because brain regions are typically engaged by many mental states, and thus a one-to-one mapping between a brain region and a mental state is not possible." Again, even the op-ed authors would likely agree that they cannot "definitively" determine anything. That's too high of a standard even for cautious neuroscientists.

(3) The letter writers point out that "the results reported in the article were apparently not peer-reviewed, nor was sufficient detail provided to evaluate the conclusions." But they may overstate the case when they say, "[W]e are distressed by the publication of research in the press that has not undergone peer review, and that uses flawed reasoning to draw unfounded conclusions about topics as important as the presidential election." Is this claim conjunctive or disjunctive? Research that has not (yet) been peer reviewed is published in mainstream media all the time. Sometimes that's good and sometimes that's bad. I doubt that they want to weigh in on this broader issue. Thus, their real concern is probably just the second part of the statement, namely that the op-ed "uses flawed reasoning to draw unfounded conclusions."

As the authors of what is essentially an extended FKF advertorial, Freedman and his colleagues have a strong incentive to tout their services and sex up the findings. Even so, many of their conclusions seem either haphazard or comically vague. Take their first point: When test subjects were shown the name of a political partyâeither the words Republican, Democrat, or Independentâthey responded with neural activity in the amygdala, the insula, and the striatum. According to the authors, these regions of the brain correspond to feelings of anxiety, disgust, and pleasure. Really, all three? From that meaningless mishmash of emotions, they meekly conclude that "voters sense both peril and promise in party brands."

. . .

So, the study's findings aren't believable on their own terms. Take a step back, and there may be more fundamental problems. At the Neuroethics and Law Blog, cognitive neuroscientist Martha Farah tweaks the FKF team for assuming that activity in a given brain region always reflects the same emotional state. When subjects looked at photos of Mitt Romney, they showed increased blood flow to the amygdalaâwhich the researchers interpreted here and elsewhere as a sign of anxiety. That's not necessarily true: The amygdala can also light up during the experience of anger, happiness, or sexual arousal.

Why has the New York Times proved so willing to donate its column space to this private company and its sloppy experiments? Perhaps the paper'seditors have fallen prey to what psychologist Frank Keil calls the "illusion of explanatory depth." As Keil has shown in his own research, even gazing dumbly at a picture of the brain makes us feel as though we're deepening our understanding of the human mind. The fMRI scans published on Sunday, and the largely unsurprising findings they are meant to support, reveal the strength of this illusion.

In his path-breaking work on the foundations of visual perception, the MIT neuro-scientist David Marr distinguished three levels at which any information-processing task can be understood and emphasized the first of these: “Although algorithms and mechanisms are empirically more accessible, it is the top level, the level of computational theory, which is critically important from an information-processing point of view. The reason for this is that the nature of the computations that underlie perception depends more upon the nature of the computational problems that have to be solved than upon the particular hardware in which their solutions are implemented.”

In this comment on Joshua Greene's essay, “The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul,” I argue that a notable weakness of Greene's approach to moral psychology is its neglect of computational theory. A central problem moral cognition must solve is to recognize (i.e., compute representations of) the deontic status of human acts and omissions. How do people actually do this? What is the theory which explains their practice?

Greene claims that emotional response “predicts” deontological judgment, but his own explanation of a subset of the simplest and most extensively studied of these judgments—trolley problem intuitions—in terms of a personal/impersonal distinction is neither complete nor descriptively adequate. In a series of influential papers, Greene argues that people rely on three features to distinguish the well-known Bystander and Footbridge problems: “whether the action in question (a) could reasonably be expected to lead to serious bodily harm, (b) to a particular person or a member or members of a particular group of people (c) where this harm is not the result of deflecting an existing threat onto a different party.” Greene claims to predict trolley intuitions and patterns of brain activity on this basis. However, this explanation is incomplete, because we are not told how people manage to interpret the stimulus in terms of these features; surprisingly, Greene leaves this crucial first step in the perceptual process unanalyzed. Additionally, Greene's account is descriptively inadequate, because it cannot explain even simple counterexamples, let alone countless real-life examples which can be found in any casebook of torts or criminal law. Hence Greene has not shown that emotional response predicts these moral intuitions in any significant sense. Rather, his studies suggest that some perceived deontological violations are associated with strong emotional responses, something few would doubt or deny. Moreover, a better explanation of these intuitions is available, one that grows out of the computational approach to cognitive science that Marr helped to pioneer.

The Neuroethics & Law Blog is pleased to present the following guest post, authored by and posted on behalf of Martha Farah, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania:

This morning’s New York Times Op Ed page presents us with dazzling pictures, from the lab of Marco Iacoboni, of the brains of swing voters as they react to photos and videos of the leading presidential candidates.Accompanying these pictures are interpretations of the patterns of brain activation offered by Iacoboni and his collaborators.Mitt Romney evokes anxiety – this is deduced from amygdala activation.John Edwards’ detractors feel disgust toward him – this is apparent in the insula of these subjects.

I suspect that most of the New York Times-reading cognitive neuroscientists of the world spent some of their Sunday morning grousing to their breakfast companions about junk science and the misapplication of functional brain imaging.Having just finished my own grousefest, I would like to undertake a slightly more constructive task – Distinguishing among what I consider to be good and bad reasons for skepticism about the conclusions of Iacoboni and colleagues, and suggesting a way to validate this sort of work.

First, some criticisms that I don’t think this work necessarily deserves, starting with the old “you can process brain imaging data to make it show anything” criticism.There is indeed a large amount of data processing involved in creating functional brain images, and in the hands of naïve or unscrupulous researchers this can distort the evidence.But the idea that functional brain images are more susceptible to fakery than many other kinds of scientific evidence is debatable.I think the extreme skepticism about image processing that one sometimes encounters is an overreaction to the realization that functional brain images are not as simple and straightforward as, say, a photograph.At present I see no reason to suspect that Iacoboni and colleagues did anything stupid or sleazy with their image processing.

Another common criticism leveled against various commercial and “real world” applications of brain imaging is that such imaging simply cannot provide useful information about the mental states of individuals, for example their reactions to specific political candidates, and that any use of brain imaging for such purposes is junk science.Functional MRI is a relatively new method, and its potential for measuring all kinds of psychological phenomena is still a matter for experimentation and exploration.Although the most tried and true applications of fMRI involve generalizations about groups of subjects performing scores of repetitions of tightly controlled experimental tasks, there are also indications that it can be extended beyond such uses.We should keep our minds open to the possibility that fMRI can indicate the kinds of attitudes and feelings that are relevant to political campaigns.

So why do I doubt the conclusions reported in today’s Op Ed piece?The problems I see have less to do with brain imaging per se than with the human tendency to make up “just so” stories and then believe them.The scattered spots of activation in a brain image can be like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup – ambiguous and accommodating of a large number of possible interpretations.The Edwards insula activation might indicate disgust, but it might also indicate thoughts of pain or other bodily sensations or a sense of unfairness, to mention just a few of the mental states associated with insula activation.And of course the possibility remains that the insula activation engendered by Edwards represents other feeling altogether, yet to be associated with the insula.The Romney amygdala activation might indicate anxiety, or any of a number of other feelings that are associated with the amygdala – anger, happiness, even sexual excitement.

Some of the interpretations offered in the Op Ed piece concern the brain states of subsets of the subjects, for example just the men or just the most negative voters.Some concern the brain states of the subjects early on in the scan compared with later in the scan.Some concern responses to still photos or to videos specifically.With this many ways of splitting and regrouping the data, it is hard not to come upon some interpretable patterns.Swish those tea leaves around often enough and you will get some nice recognizable pictures of ocean liners and tall handsome strangers appearing in your cup!

How can we tell whether the interpretations offered by Iacoboni and colleagues are adequately constrained by the data, or are primarily just-so stories?By testing their methods using images for which we know the “right answer.”If the UCLA group would select a group of individuals for which we can all agree in advance on the likely attitudes of a given set of subjects, they could carry out imaging studies like the ones they reported today and then, blind to the identity of personage and subject for each set of scans, interpret the patterns of activation.

I would love to know the outcome of this experiment.I don’t think it is impossible that Iacoboni and colleagues have extracted some useful information about voter attitudes from their imaging studies.This probably puts me at the optimistic end of the spectrum of cognitive neuroscientists reading this work.However, until we see some kind of validation studies, I will remain skeptical.

In closing, there is a larger issue here, beyond the validity of a specific study of voter psychology.A number of different commercial ventures, from neuromarketing to brain-based lie detection, are banking on the scientific aura of brain imaging to bring them customers, in addition to whatever real information the imaging conveys.The fact that the UCLA study involved brain imaging will garner it more attention, and possibly more credibility among the general public, than if it had used only behavioral measures like questionnaires or people’s facial expressions as they watched the candidates.Because brain imaging is a more high tech approach, it also seems more “scientific” and perhaps even more “objective.”Of course, these last two terms do not necessarily apply.Depending on the way the output of UCLA’s multimillion dollar 3-Tesla scanner is interpreted, the result may be objective and scientific, or of no more value than tea leaves.

I recently happened upon a working paper from 2005 by Princeton economists Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer entitled, "The Case for Mindless Economics." The paper provides a response to what the authors call "the neuroeconomic critique" of economics. Here's an excerpt: